Bridging the Gap Between Asset/Capacity Building and Needs Assessment

"There is great tension between the two camps - and if this book can bring the two together to a certain extent it will be a valuable tool." -- Paul Komarek "Building capacity is an important concept to develop in areas like Emergency/Disaster Planning and Community Relations. In addition to its scholarly value, it could be useful for practitioners too." -- Kenneth Goldberg "The material reflects a strengths-based model that is among the best-practices currently available." -- Judith Birgen "Combining two approaches that are complementary in many ways...novel idea, have not seen this proposed before." -- Brian P. Leung, PhD "...Highlights the value of both Needs Assessment (NA) and Assets Based Community Development (ABCD), moving beyond "either/or" thinking about the knowledge and skills that are needed to bring about community change." -- Barbara Soniat "It provides a very good step-by-step approach to identifying community challenges and assets/capacities and how to develop plans to address them. Realistic and practical." -- Kenneth Goldberg "The virtue of this text is that it is specific, sequenced, and offers a number of examples useful to students who find the content somewhat novel. For social work, students can bring this kind of text into the practicum environment and employ it as a road map for working with community members in completing projects. So, the text lends itself to project-based, problem-focused, and/or action learning. This is an asset. " -- David P. Moxley "I have seen nothing as thorough as this work. No one else synthesizes the material the way the author has done. I enjoyed the continuum from cooperation to collaboration and found the needs and assets discussions to be useful." -- Judith Birgen